


as i was young

by goukyorin (sashimisusie)



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, Originally Posted on Tumblr, young cassandra pentaghast
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-11
Updated: 2015-04-11
Packaged: 2018-03-06 11:44:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3133199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sashimisusie/pseuds/goukyorin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is young and barely even a Seeker, but there is a sword on her hip and a shield in her hand, and Cassandra Pentaghast will not be afraid anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. practice

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a Dylan Thomas poem.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Few of her memories are untainted by blood, but there is one such gem that stands out. In the many years since she first picked up a sword, the ghost of her brother's wooden practice sword remains the most precious to her.

Cassandra is seven years old when Anthony motions for her to come closer, one hand behind his back to mask  _something_  from view and the other at his lip. She is small, but she can be discreet and so she tiptoes, as if avoiding the shambling corpses in the manse, to him.

With a flourish that makes her giggle, he sets a wooden practice sword down into her waiting hands. It is _almost_  as good as the real thing to the young girl, who turns hopeful gaze up to the brother who is both light and life in the bleakness of her gilded cage.

 **“** Are we going to hunt dragons together, Anthony?  **”** She swings her arms as she walks, two steps for every one that he takes.  **“** You promised to take me one day, remember?  **”**

He ruffles the glossy mess of her hair—it’s  _hard_  to braid it and she refuses to ask for help, struggling in the mirror with her tongue between her teeth—and laughs, the sound bright as the sun behind the clouds.  **“** You’ll have to be a little bigger, Cassie. A dragon could use you as a toothpick, and then where would I be without you?  **”**

Cassandra frowns, huffing as she crosses her arms, but her displeasure does not last long when he offers to show her how to use the practice blade that hangs heavy at her hip. Anthony would never go back on a promise, she repeats as she practices the interplay of movement and form in secret. He is  _good_ , and  _strong_ , and all of the things a Pentaghast should be, and one day she will be just like him.


	2. practice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted on tumblr as a meme response for [malcolm-hawke](http://malcolm-hawke.tumblr.com/), where the prompt was "Send “Stay behind me” for my muse’s reaction to yours gently pushing them behind their body."
> 
> Small angry Cassandra gives me life, and many emotions.

**“** Byron!  _Wait_!  **”**

She is not ready. Those are the words her mentor says to her when the Templars descend the stairs with only the slightest hitch to their downward trajectory from the stairwell that indicates not all has gone well. It’s bad luck that has the Seeker Byron and Cassandra in Kirkwall on the eve of a Harrowing. One that has not gone according to plan.

She is not ready, he says, but what Cassandra hears is this: you are too young. Too young, too brash, too full of emotion. That she’s proving such a point by shouting down the hallway is not a thought that immediately occurs to her. Anger makes her unlike the girl that those maleficarum left brotherless that day, spite curling around to warp her into the image of something else entirely.

Cassandra  _hates_ and wants to be where she  _should_  be. What is so hard to understand about that, that they would pledge her to the Seekers rather than the Templars she ran to that day? It’s a Seeker that she runs after today. Or starts to, before she crashes face-first into the back of a robed figure.

 **“** Let me go, you oaf!  **”**

She uses her words as a weapon, cutting remarks to augment her small hands, shoving back until a roar from the depths up above freezes the man she’s collided into and the apprentice in place.

_( Four years old, and barely old enough to remember Anthony’s hand shielding her sight. Six years old with leaves in her hair and dirt on her boots, before they bring her back to the place she ran from. Ten, and still not old enough to go with Byron. )_

The man draws a hand back to keep her behind him but she shakes herself loose to stand beside him. She is still small, and barely even a Seeker but Cassandra Pentaghast will not be afraid anymore.

 


	3. quidnunc

>   
>  _**Quidnunc** \- One who always has to know what is going on._  
> 

Cassandra is six years old and awake past her bedtime, pressing an ear to the keyhole to overheard things she does not yet understand. Her father raises his voice for a moment and she panics at the possibility of trouble, small feet pattering quietly down the hallway to her brother’s room.

 **“** What is rebellion?  **”** she asks, pressing cold hands to Anthony’s cheek in order to rouse him from dreaming sleep. She needs a reason for the edge of fear in their mother’s tone, and the hushed silence.  _She needs to know._

He pulls back the covers and pats the bed beside him, explaining as simply as he can. The fear does not subside from the young girl, but her brother is warm and he will protect her from what she does not yet understand. Months later, Anthony covers her eyes with his hands when the executioner’s blade severs them from their old life.

 **“** That,  **”** he murmurs to Cassandra, voice cracking as he leads her away from the blood-stained stones,  **“** Was a rebellion.  **”**

She is eighteen when she shrugs on her armour just after midnight, sleep eluding the young Seeker in spite of her earlier exhaustion. Footsteps sound where there should be silence, and she holds her breath as she stealthily follows the lumbering pace of Seeker Byron down to the depths of the fortress.

 **“**  What have you done?  **”**  Cassandra demands of her mentor, fleeing headlong into a conspiracy with him when the alarm— _the girl is gone, High Seeker, the perimeter has been breached!_ —is raised. A blade silences him as it did her parents, and the Seeker is left to uncover the truth on her own (once more).

Decades later, the sky is torn open, the Divine is dead, and there is one question at the forefront of her mind:  _why_?


End file.
